About Me

Staten Island, New York, United States
I've worked in the FDNY for the past 29 years. I've written freelance commentary for the past twenty years and have one book published "Looking Up (A Working View)," Quiet Storm Publishers. For those of you with whom my ideas resonate, we probably share a common love of Liberty. If you like anything you read here, feel free to reuse...just please add my appellation. Life's been more than fair to me and this is a part of my humble offering back. If you have any corrections, or additions, please email me (my email address is in my profile) and I’ll both appreciate and consider them all and do my best to get back to you with my thoughts on it. My ideas are always evolving and I’m open to persuasion in all areas. I thank all those who've taken some of their time to read here.

Wednesday, April 2, 2014

In
Mr. Errol Louis’ Op-Ed Victory Over Bias,
a Long Time Coming, the actual FACTS about the FDNY’s entrance exams were conveniently
omitted. For instance, the fact that these exams have long been calibrated to
grade-school (7th & 8th grade) reading levels, for a
job requiring a minimum of a H.S. diploma and ostensibly a 12th
grade reading level at minimum.

Fact
is these exams have long been set BELOW even the bare minimum standards
required for this job. Mr. Louis quotes a blatantly biased judge, who claims, “The city did not take sufficient
measures to ensure that better performers on its examinations would actually be
better firefighters.” When all that these most basic exams have tested for is a
desire to minimally prepare for exams with questions like one showing four views
of a traditional gauge (¼, ½, ¾ and full) and asking, “Which indicates half full”?
The same opponents of the Civil Service Merit System have assailed questions directly
related to firefighting as “too job specific, requiring a knowledge of
firefighting principles an applicant shouldn’t be expected to be familiar with,”
even when such questions merely ask for information already supplied in the referenced
essay.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, Errol
Louis, as well as Mayor de Blasio have all expressed the view that “New
York City’s workforce should look like New York City.” In that case,
the ONE glaring disparity in New York City’s workforce the gross
over-representation of non-Latino blacks (23% of NYC’s population and 36% of its
Municipal workforce...a staggering 58% above their numbers in New York City’s
population; http://www.citylimits.org/news/articles/4038/the-whitest-city-agencies#.Uy4bR_ldVHa)
must be addressed, ESPECIALLY considering that so many of the largest discrepancies
exist in agencies where objective criteria (like basic exams) are absent. That
discrepancy is made all the more distressing because of the appearance of
special (political) considerations, which smacks of the old, corrupt political
patronage system.

In a city that is rapidly
becoming more Asian and Hispanic, overlooking the singularly most glaring
ethnic disparity in New York City’s Municipal workforce - the gross over-representation
of non-Latino blacks, the ONLY ethnic group with numbers greater than 10% of
their portion of the City’s population represented in New York City’s municipal
workforce – is a very big deal.